ical retail environment. For some people, running a business with a sibling would be a recipe for disaster. But for Guy Nappa, who co-owns Oz Hair & Beauty with his brother Anthony Nappa, it is “genuinely fun”. And no wonder, given the fast-growing omnichannel hair-care business has gone from strength to strength since it was founded in 2013. “My parents are hairdressers. About 13 years ago, my brother Anthony started selling all the products in their salon on eBay and it just got bigger and bigger,” Nappa told Inside Retail. “Every few weeks, he kept putting more products on, then he started getting different brands, and then eventually he made the call to build a website and own the customer experience.” It was around this time, in 2015, that Nappa officially joined Oz Hair & Beauty as a partner. He had previously worked in the warehouse during school holidays, picking and packing orders, and he channelled his natural affinity for process and order into an operations role. “The nickname for him is ‘growth’ and I’m ‘stability’ because we’re very different people,” Nappa explained. “The first thing I did in the warehouse was put in a new system that allowed us to scale, instead of just putting more people on. That’s how our relationship as partners has developed – we don’t do things together, we do things separately so we can divide and conquer.” Backing from industry heavyweights This investment in infrastructure paid off when Covid-19 hit, and demand for professional hair-care products suddenly went through the roof. Thanks to a new warehouse-management system and agile processes, Oz Hair & Beauty was able to keep up with the spike in orders from customers who could no longer visit a salon. The company’s revenue grew 68 per cent, to $40 million, in the 12 months ended June 30, 2021, the Australian Financial Review reported. In October of that year, retail billionaire Brett Blundy, Accent Group CEO Daniel Agostinelli and private equity firm Edison Growth Fund invested in the business. “Just being backed by these heavyweights gave us the confidence that we were onto something,” Nappa said. As part of the deal, the brothers took over their parents’ salon in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building and turned it into their first store. They quickly opened several more, and today, there are 15 Oz Hair & Beauty stores in New South Wales. They plan to have 50 stores by the end of 2026 and see a pathway to having 100 stores eventually. “We feel the stores give us more brand awareness. It’s essentially a billboard in that location,” Nappa said. He led the launch of digital pricing labels in stores in 2024 and aims to roll out more integrations between online and offline in the year ahead. Oz Hair & Beauty offers virtual beauty consultations and has over 1 million product reviews on its website, which customers can look up via QR code in-store. Its key point of difference, Nappa argued, is the education and expert advice it offers customers. The entire customer service team is ex-hairdressers and beauty therapists. “The data says that maybe 3 per cent of hair care is professional hair care,” Nappa said. The rest of the market is mass-market brands primarily sold in grocery stores. “I think it’s long overdue that professional hair care gets this time in the light and we’re giving that to customers and giving them more options,” he added. The company’s current growth rate is 30 per cent year on year. Fixing the 1 per cent problems While Oz Hair & Beauty has changed a lot over the last decade – it now has more than 250 employees and a booming private label brand – Nappa sees his role as unchanged: “Operations is just trying to make things faster, better, cheaper or improve the customer experience,” he said. This suits Mr Stability perfectly: “When you’re running 100 miles an hour, you can’t see where the issues are and everyone’s stressed, because everyone’s so busy. But when you make a change and you see an impact, that’s a reward. You almost get addicted to fixing those 1 per cent problems because they have such a large impact on the business.” Further reading: Why Oz Hair & Beauty is shifting its focus from online to physical retail